early

• At the height of the most recent Ice Age, about 35,000 years ago, much of the world's water was locked up in vast continental ice sheets
• A land bridge as much as 1,500 kilometers wide connected Asia and North America
• By 12,000 years ago, humans were living throughout much of the Western Hemisphere
• The first Americans crossed the land bridge from Asia and were believed to have stayed in what is now Alaska for thousands of years
• They then moved south into the land that was to become the United States
• Early groups of Native Americans


  • Hohokam
  • Adenans
  • Hopewellians
  • Anasazi
• Early Native American groups


  • Built villages and grew crops
  • Some built mounds of earth in the shapes of pyramids, birds, or serpents
  • Their life was closely tied to the land, and their society was clan-oriented and communal
  • Elements of the natural world played an essential part in their spiritual beliefs
  • Their culture was primarily oral, although some developed a type of hieroglyphics to preserve certain texts
  • There was a good deal of trade among the groups but also that some of their relations were hostile
• For reasons not yet completely understood, these early groups disappeared over time and were replaced by other groups of Native Americans, including Hopi and Zuni, who flourished
• By the time Europeans reached what is now the United States, about two million native people, maybe more, lived here
• The first Europeans to arrive in North America were Norse
• Erik the Red founded a settlement in Greenland


  Around 985
• Leif, Erik the Red's son, is thought to have explored the northeast coast of what is now Canada

  1001
• Ruins of Norse houses dating from that time have been discovered at L'Anse-aux-Meadows in northern Newfoundland
• It would be almost 500 more years before other Europeans reached North America and another 100 years after that before permanent settlements were established
• The first explorers were searching for a sea passage to Asia
• Others — chiefly British, Dutch, French, and Spanish — came later to claim the lands and riches of what they called the "New World"
• The first and most famous of these explorers was Christopher Columbus of Genoa
• Columbus landed on islands in the Caribbean Sea in 1492, but he never saw the mainland of the future United States
• John Cabot of Venice came five years later on a mission for the king of England
• Cabot's journey was quickly forgotten, but it provided the basis for British claims to North America
• The 1500s were the age of Spanish exploration in the Americas
• Juan Ponce de León landed in what is now Florida in 1513
• Hernando De Soto reached Florida in 1539 and continued as far as the Mississippi River
• In 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado set out north from Mexico, which Spain had conquered in 1522, in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola
• Coronado never found the Seven Cities of Cibola, but his travels took him as far as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, as well as into the Great Plains
• While the Spanish were pushing up from the south, the northern portion of the present-day United States was slowly being revealed through the journeys of other Europeans
• These included Giovanni da Verrazano, Jacques Cartier, and Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the continent — America — would be named
• The first permanent European settlement in what was to become the United States was established by the Spanish in the middle 1500s at St. Augustine in Florida
• However, St. Augustine would not play a part in the formation of the new nation
• That story took place in settlements farther north along the Atlantic coast — in Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and the 10 other areas colonized by a growing tide of immigrants from Europe